190 Dr. Wallace on 
récolte, qui sont remarquable par leur grosseur et leur richesse 
en soie. Le climat maritime et un peu humide de |’Angleterre, 
serait-il favorable a l’amélioration de cette espéce ?” 
It is, however, due to Mr. F. Moore, of the East India Museum, 
to state that he first in England possessed and reared this species ; 
larvee of which, feeding on the castor-oil plant, Ricinus Palma 
Christi, and hatched from eggs sent by M. Guérin-Méneville, 
were exhibited by Mr. Moore before the Entomological Society 
of London in October, 1859. 
In 1863 Lady D. Nevill thus writes,* ‘ Last summer (1862) I 
netted over three dozen trees, and placed 500 worms on them; 
they yielded 480 cocoons: a bird got under the net and took off 
some before it was arrested in its mischievous career. No wind 
or weather seemed to hurt the worms, and we kept some of the 
later ones on the trees when even the leaves were frost-bitten, 
but the worms did not seem to suffer. I have no doubt as to 
their hardiness. The three dozen trees about five feet high would 
have fed at least 2,000 worms if we had had them, as the more 
the worms devour the leaves the stronger the latter shoot forth.” 
And in “The Queen” for February 28, 1863, was published an 
account by Mr. Frank Buckland of ‘what he saw at Dangstein in 
the preceding summer. ‘Her ladyship has set apart a portion 
of her beautiful and well-ordered garden, and has planted it with 
young Ailanthus trees, covering them over with a light canvass- 
made building: a precaution rendered necessary by the birds, who 
pick off the young worms. Onentering the building I saw, for the 
first time, the living worms; they were in the highest state of 
perfection and really beautiful things to look at: not white-faced, 
pale-looking things like the common silkworm, but magnificent 
fellows from 23 to 3 inches long, of an intense emerald-green 
colour, with the tubercles tipped with a gorgeous miarine-blue. 
Her ladyship pointed out to me how the silkworms held on to the 
leaves: they cared nothing for the rain, less for the wind: their 
feet have greater adhesive power than the suckers of the cuttle 
fish ; and their bodies are covered with a fine down [powder ? ], 
which turns the rain drops like the tiny hairs on the leaf of a 
cabbage. Many of them had made their cocoons, picking out 
snug quiet corners, and were working away like diligent and 
useful weavers as they are. Lady Nevill explained how readily 
and at what little expense they were cultivated, and that she 
found a ready market for all the cocoons she could grow: a 
gentleman in Paris having offered to take all she could supply for 
* See Report of the Acclimatization Society for 1863, pay a} 
